About Your Company
The University of Leicester is a leading UK research-intensive university renowned for its innovation and interdisciplinary approach to solving complex industrial challenges. Within the School of Engineering, the Digital Twin Laboratory is at the forefront of advanced manufacturing research, particularly focused on the sintering processes of ceramics and composites. The lab specialises in applying modelling, finite element analysis, and machine learning techniques to develop predictive models for manufacturing optimisation.
Your Work with MICG
As the lead academic partner in Work Stream 2 (WS2) of the Midlands Advanced Ceramics for Industry 4.0 (MICG) programme, the Digital Twin Lab at Leicester has developed and implemented advanced digital twin technologies tailored to the ceramic manufacturing sector. The team collaborates with industrial partners such as Rolls-Royce, Morgan Advanced Materials, and Lucideon to model and mitigate sintering distortion and shrinkage.
Using a combination of classical constitutive laws, physics-informed Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), and custom subroutines in ABAQUS, WS2 has delivered digital twins that replicate real-world manufacturing scenarios. These digital twins integrate experimental data and provide actionable insights to streamline production, reduce post-sintering costs, and accelerate new product development.
Aims for the Future under the MICG Programme
Looking ahead, the University of Leicester aims to:
Disseminate scientific advancements through journal publications, and national/international conferences.
Expand digital twin applications to new products identified in collaboration with industrial partners.
Integrate nested machine learning architectures, such as ANN and RNN, into ABAQUS to simulate complex phenomena including flash sintering and anisotropic shrinkage.
Develop surrogate-based digital twins using Design of Experiments (DoE) and ML.
Share methodologies and tools across the MICG consortium to enable adoption of predictive sintering models by UK ceramics manufacturers.
